The city had been laid out by ancient Saxon or Roman cows, and rarely had their paths been straight. One village had run into, another, all higgledy-piggledy; and where was Bandbox Lane High Court, or Old Pine Hill New Corners? — you might be within a quarter of a mile of the place, but you couldn't find a soul who had ever heard of it. Few streets had the same name for any distance; you would start walking on the Strand, and presently it was Fleet Street, and then it was Ludgate Hill, Cannon Street, Fenchurch, Aldgate — and like as not would evaporate and disappear entirely. The same peculiarity was shared by the old buildings; you would go down a corridor, and descend three steps, and turn to the left, pass three doors and climb a winding stairway, turn to the right, walk a dozen steps — and knock on a door which hadn't been opened for a hundred years.
Lanny felt in an adventurous mood that evening and started off in a new direction. For a while he was on a wide thoroughfare, with motorcars taking people to the theaters, and crowds looking into windows of gaily decorated shops. Then little by little the neighborhood changed; the shops became poorer, the men wore caps, and the women dingy shawls. The street began to ramble, and Lanny did the same; he was keeping in a general easterly direction, but that didn't mean anything special, for he had never heard of the East End of London. He had the general idea that the seven million population was composed mainly of ladies and gentlemen such as he had seen in Mayfair, with their servants and tradespeople, and a sprinkling of saucy flower girls, lively newsboys, and picturesque old beggars trying to sell you “a box o' lights.”
But now Lanny had walked through a looking glass, or plunged down a shaft to the center of the earth, or to the bottom of the sea; he had taken a drug, or fallen into a trance — something or other that had transported him into a new world. He couldn't believe his eyes, and walked on, fascinated, staring; it just couldn't be real, there couldn't be such creatures on earth! English men and women were tall, and stood up straight, and took bold strides, and had long thin faces, sometimes a little too long, especially the women — Robbie impolitely called them horse-faces! Both men and women whom Lanny had met had rosy complexions, sometimes alarmingly so, suggestive of apoplexy. But suddenly here were creatures squat and stooped, that shambled instead of walking; their legs were short and their arms long — they looked like apes more than human beings! Features crooked, teeth missing, complexions sallow or pasty — no, this couldn't be England!
And the clothes they had on! Lanny had never seen such rags, never dreamed they existed on earth. Clothes that were not fitted to the human form, but dangled as on scarecrows, and when they threatened to fall to pieces were fastened with pins or bits of string, or even pieces of wood. They were filthy with every sort of grime and grease, and gave out the musty acrid smell of stale human sweat; the sum total of it filled the streets and polluted the winds that blew from the North Sea.
And the swarms of these creatures! Where did they come from, and where could they go? The sidewalks were crowded, so that you had to jostle your way. There were no longer any motorcars or carriages, and few horse-drawn vehicles, only pushcarts, called “barrows.” Many had things to sell, things that must surely have been gathered out of dustbins: old rags of clothing, as bad as what the people had on; worn, badly patched shoes set in rows along the curb; the cheapest vegetables, wilted and bruised; stinking fish, scraps of meat turned purple or black, old rusty pans, chipped and damaged crockery, all the rubbish of the world. Shops had it spread out in front, and shopkeepers stood watching, while dingy women with bedraggled skirts pulled things about and smelled and chaffered and argued. Tired workingmen sat on the steps, puffing at pipes. Babies swarmed everywhere, ghostly death's-head children suckled on gin. There were innumerable garbage cans, and hardly one without some human creature digging in it for food.
Every other place, it seemed, was a pub. Murmurs and sometimes uproar came from within, and now and then a drunken man would push back the swinging doors and stagger forth — bringing with him a reek of alcohol, and more of that dreadful animal stench, and shouts and curses in a language bearing odd resemblances to the one that Lanny used. He would listen and try to puzzle out the words. A young woman with a ragged straw hat, pulling herself loose from a man: “Blymee, I 'ave ter git the dyner fer me bybee!” What was that? And two fellows coming out of a pub wiping big mustaches on coatsleeves and carrying on an argument, one shouting at the other: “Ow, gow an' be a Sowcialist!”
VII
The sun had gone down behind Lanny's back, and twilight was letting down its veils over this strange nightmare. One who thought of being a painter might have noted interesting effects of darkness and shadow; somber brick tenements, three or four stories high, blackened with the smoke of centuries; forests of chimney pots pouring out new blackness all the time; sodden human figures, shawl clad and hunched, growing dimmer in the twilight, blending into the shadows of walls and doorways and dustbins full of trash. But Lanny wasn't thinking about art; he was overcome with more direct, more human emotions. That there should be a world like this, so near to the glittering hotel where his mother and her friends were dancing in their jeweled gowns and slippers! That there should be human beings of English blood, sunk to this state of squalor!
Lanny was beginning to be uneasy. This slum appeared to be endless, and he didn't know how to get out of it. He had been told that any time he lost his way, he should ask a “bobby,” but there appeared to be none in this lost world, and Lanny didn't know if it was safe to speak to any of these lost people. The men seemed to be looking at him with hostile eyes, and the leering women frightened him no less. “Two bob to you, mytey!” a girl would say, holding out her hands with what she meant for a seductive gesture. Starved children followed him, beggars whined and showed their sores and crippled limbs; he hurried on, being afraid to take out his purse.
Darkness was falling fast. The shopping district of the slum came to an end, and Lanny, trying to find a better neighborhood, followed a street that widened out. There were sheds, and gravel under foot; dimly he could see benches, and people sitting on them — the same terrible ape figures in stinking rags, men and women and children: a baby laid on its back, and no one even troubling to put a cover on it; whole families huddled near together; a bearded man with his head back, snoring, a woman curled up against him; a man and a woman lying in each other's arms.